We are almost on the other side of COVID...or so we hope, as a nation. We spent two weeks at level 2 and are now in level one. We've been back at school, fully open for five weeks now and our reintegration to our new normal has been slow and steady. At best we've had 88% of students back at school, but due to illness or parent prerogative this fluctuates greatly.
Since our return, our main focus has been on wellbeing - students and teachers. In class students have been reuniting, getting their bearings and navigating where they are in their learning. While many of our students were engaged in home learning in some way, shape or form, those who didn't have found engaging in learning full time, a struggle. I believe that is also the reason for the fluctuation in attendance.
Life back at the chalk face will change due to COVID. We intend to fully utilise our learning during the pandemic so while we are focusing on wellbeing across the school, we are also evaluating and reflecting on what worked with online learning, what didn't and where to from here. We have carried out surveys with students and teachers to tease out the new learning we achieved and how we can adapt and embed it from home to school. We also intend to seek thoughts from parents through a home survey, using this feedback to inform our learning pathways.
There are two things that we have implemented so far as a result of our COVID experiences. Firstly, we have revamped our mid year report formats to reflect learning at home during lockdown. The format includes a specific section for whanau to comment on their child's home learning in addition to tick boxes indicating how the child learned e.g: engaged in learning independently, with whanau and completing tasks (both online and hardcopy). This report is an interim one, we will also write an end of year report based on the old style, which has a strong element of National Standards in it. Our intention is that next year we will introduce 'live reporting' to parents through an app called Seesaw and this is the second outcome of our COVID experience. During the lockdown parents were
presented with the opportunity to learn with their children in a wide variety of ways. One way for us to encourage home learning to take place was to ask parents to share their child's learning on our facebook page. For many households providing an audience engaged students more readily with a number of families sharing what they were doing with our community. This provided a catalyst for us to fast track Seesaw in our school. Seesaw is the educational equivalent to facebook, where student's work is uploaded to the app and parents receive posts in real time showing learning in action.
There is still much to do with COVID providing the platform for many changes within our old school system. We're excited. Stay tuned.
